A Case of Mistaken Identity: The Irish in Postwar Britain

Abstract

According to the 1948 British Nationality Act, there were three types of people in the world: British subjects, aliens, and Irish citizens?a strange piece of legislation indeed. So strange that one contemporary lawyer re ferred to the Irish provisions of the act as unique in statute law . . . [and] without precedent in legislation dealing with nationality.1 Unique was the provision that any citizen of Eire, although an alien, then or in the future living in the United Kingdom, would be given all the privileges and many of the responsibilities of a British subject without having to become a British subject. Privileges included the right to enter the country freely, take up any employment available, and vote and stand for Parliament; obligations included paying taxes and, after two years continuous resi dence, performing National Service. Thus Britain became perhaps the only country in the world to make no distinction between its own citizens and one group of aliens. In spite of the quirky nature of these provisions, however, they continued to govern relations between the United Kingdom and Ireland even after Ireland left the Commonwealth and became a re public in 1949, and even after the United Kingdom imposed immigration control upon certain classes of real British subjects in 1962, 1968, 1971, and 1981.2 This legislation raises two principal questions: Why did British policy makers create a new class of people for the purposes of nationality law, and why did that class remain constant through so many other changes? Three answers suggest themselves: first, the economic crisis and labor shortage which Britain suffered after World War Two; second, UK policymakers' de termination that members of the British Empire, though rapidly forming a Commonwealth of Nations, should remain united and centered upon Brit ain; third, UK policymakers' racialized understanding of the world's popu lation, which deemed race rather than skin color to be an unmodifiable and genetic characteristic, and which hierarchized European cultures over all others. Together, these questions and answers suggest that postwar Britain's governing elite successfully manipulated notions of identity and definitions of citizenship in order to preserve a useful labor supply and a united empire/Commonwealth. This success itself raises further questions about the fluidity of national identity and the value of migrant labor. Elected in July 1945, Clement Attlee's Labour government promised a new age of social citizenship to be brought about by infrastructural nation alization and the institution of a welfare state; less explicitly, it promised